Next To Normal
by MyHeartInMyWords
Summary: The mind's a fragile thing. Peeta and Katniss were great examples of that. But the morning that Katniss was wheeled into the hospital and hooked up to wires, it surely tested the idea of fragility. The mind was an unpredictable thing. Post-Mockingjay.


It was late at night when there was a knock at the door. Being up so late every night, Katniss was the only one who heard it, so she padded down the dark corridor and opened the door. It was her sister, bright and smiling.

They settled in their spots at the foot of the fireplace.

"I'm not a little duck anymore."

Katniss chuckled. "I know, Prim."

"Especially after growing into my clothes, and my shirt doesn't stick out."

"It doesn't, does it?" Katniss smiled to herself.

"So what will you give me for my birthday? A cake?"

"Whatever you want, Prim. For you, anything."

* * *

_This is ridiculous_, Katniss thought with a huff. She planted her knuckles on her hips and glared at the mess she had made in the kitchen. It looked like a bag of flour was trampled over by a rambunctious group of hens while laying eggs across the floor. She did her best to convince herself that the black block of what was supposed to be cake sitting on the counter wasn't made with her own two hands. _Why am I the one making this?_ she griped.

"What's going on in here?" Peeta asked when he walked in on the disaster. He looked amused.

Katniss refused to acknowledge his facial expression. "Nothing," she replied flatly. She didn't wait another beat to go to work and dump everything into the garbage bin. "I don't know why I bothered. You spend more time in this room than I do."

"Did you even look at the recipe?" Stifling a laugh, Peeta rolled up his sleeves and prepped a clean mixing bowl. Even though he'd been already putting in hours at the bakery, like any good man of the house, he was always willing to help out his wife. He wanted to help as much as he could. "Must be for a special occasion," he assumed.

"Birthday," she clarified as she scraped at the encrusted goop at the bottom of the oven.

"Mother?" In entered their daughter, with arms full of textbooks about herbs and other medicines. She stopped short at the smell of tar. "Will there be dinner?" she asked warily. "If not, I'll be in my room studying."

"Of course there'll be dinner, Colline," Katniss said. "Call your brother and tell him to come out from his room."

With a roll of her blue eyes, she called down the hall, "Abel!"

When her call wasn't returned, Peeta sighed. Their son Abel was about as useful around the house as a couch cushion; all he did was sleep and eat, ever rarely getting out of the house to experience any social affairs. "It'll be the day when he gets out of bed on time," he grumbled as he went to retrieve his son, leaving the mother and daughter alone in the same room.

"So," Colline began, although she kept some distance by staying on the other side of the kitchen counter. "Did Father finally burn something?"

"Would you believe me if I said yes?" Katniss returned lightly as she proceeded to concentrate on tidying up the splatters.

"Why were you even baking? That's what Father does for a living," Colline said bluntly, which came all too naturally. Some have said that she got her straightforwardness from her mother, but Colline would argue that she was nothing like her mother. She was an odd individual. Even her own mother thought so.

"As I was telling your Father," Katniss said, "I was making a birthday cake."

"For who?"

"For your Aunt Prim."

The room stilled. Peeta, a groggy Abel, and Colline stared at Katniss, who seemed to be the only one who wasn't fazed. Colline slowly turned to her father and shot him a worried glance. Peeta lifted his eyes to catch his clueless wife's attention. He took measured strides to her, rid her hands of the cleaning rag and held them in his.

"We have an Aunt?" Abel asked stupidly.

But Peeta ignored him. "Katniss," he said, distressed. "She's not here."

"I know." Katniss tried to read her family's faces, but finally settled on Peeta's. She didn't understand why he was so serious; she was the serious one.

"No, I mean, she's not _here_." He hoped the emphasis did the trick. "I know you know."

Katniss shook her head. "I…don't understand." Disorientation set in.

"We've lost her." Abel threw up his arms in the air. "We've lost her, haven't we? Just like Grandma."

"Not now, Abel," Peeta dismissed aggravatingly. His eyes were fixed on Katniss', hoping his son was wrong. "You need to wake up, Katniss, if you think you're dreaming again. Prim…isn't here. She's been dead for years…"

* * *

"She doesn't want the pills anymore. She's being convinced to not take them…by someone else."

"We'll try the ECT treatment."

"ECT—what is that? What will it do to her exactly?"

"It's electroconvulsive therapy. Mr. Mellark, nothing's for certain, but we aim to treat your wife's severe depression at its core."

"Will it hurt her? It's just—she's already been through so much. I know."

* * *

But Peeta couldn't know just what Katniss was going through. They may have had lived several years together, practically tied to each other for support after the Games and the War, but these two survivors were dealt different cards of post-traumatic disorders.

Peeta had suffered the pains of a Hijacking, and Katniss received the repercussions: near-death strangling in the middle of the night; instances where she had been held at knifepoint at dinner; and worse, the evenings where she would frantically search the bed for his warm body, but would end up with empty arms.

But Peeta somehow pushed all his hallucinations away and managed to learn to love Katniss again, even marry her and have children with her, despite the obvious fact that she had her own disturbing ailments aside from enduring Peeta's violence.

Katniss had laid for days on end in her bed after the War. Alone, at first, while Peeta regained mental stability. And the days that she had enough energy to crawl out from under the covers, she would visit the cemetery and feel this strong envy for those who had carved tombstones. Because in slow motion, she saw her world fade, blacken almost, and the feeling of dying inside every time she'd remember the past.

It was like all the death she had witnessed in such a short time compiled and compressed into a ticking timebomb that just fit inside her head. Peeta had tried to relate, to reassure that it would all get better soon. But he didn't know how much Katniss was screaming on the inside, trying to get away from all the damaged she had caused by rebelling against the Capitol. Like a refugee, a fugitive—a never-ending run from her life. And if it ever caught up with her, it would surely be the end of her. The only thing that had kept her intact were the visits her sister Prim paid.

So when that time bomb was close to exploding, Peeta had his wife and mother of two children treated with pills that had helped him get through the toughest times. And they helped. In fact, they were working so well that she had lost all the highs and lows. She'd been living on a baseline of mediocrity, much to Peeta's relief, and eventually she was diagnosed as stable.

So long as she kept up with her medication. But Prim disapproved of Katniss taking such psychotic medicines, so down the sink they went.

* * *

"I know it's hard, Katniss," Peeta began.

"No, you don't," Katniss said with her face in her hands. When she felt someone touch her back, she flinched.

A look of hurt crossed his face. "This is insane; you won't even let me touch you anymore!"

"Katniss?"

After catching the faintest sound of stability, Katniss strode to the nearest chair and fell into her seat, dazed and disoriented once again. "Peeta, I—"

"Look, you have to realize I'm trying to help you here, Katniss." Peeta dropped to his knees in front of her and tried to search for her grey eyes. "I care about you, I've always been here for you. But lately you've been looking at me like you don't know who I am," he said. "Like when I was…troubled."

"Tell him, Katniss." When she felt Prim's hand slide down her arm, it all felt too real.

All the same, Katniss shook her head. "Because you just don't understand, Peeta…"

"Then tell me!" he begged. "Tell me when you're hurting, when you're bleeding, broken, bruised."

"He wouldn't have the slightest clue on how to treat those. But I do, you know that."

"Tell me what to do." Peeta hesitated. "Because I'm the one who's here. I'm not going anywhere. You need to know that I need you, too. Through all this, I'm hurting, too."

"You say that," Katniss shakily said.

"But he doesn't know."

"But you don't know," Katniss echoed the voice in her head. "You're fixed, Peeta. You've woken up from your nightmares, but I'm here living them."

"If he doesn't understand…then he should just go."

Katniss swallowed before whispering, "Maybe it's best if you just go."

* * *

Although Colline knew Aunt Prim was a mere figment of her mother's imagination, Colline had never had to work so hard to compete for her own mother's attention. For an aunt who was dead before she had been born, Prim was making her niece's life incredibly difficult.

Colline felt invisible to this ghostly figure. No amount of herbal discoveries or infection-clearing solutions could win her mother over. Not with this immortalized doctor prodigy haunting her.

But as the daughter of two sole leaders and survivors of the War, she felt obligated to salvage the family name by being an amazing healer. She had the library textbooks. She went on excursions deep into the woods on the search for undiscovered plants, edible and poisonous. With the help of her grandmother—her own depression notwithstanding—Colline read up on her traditional methods on how to sew stitches and treat burns.

Although it seemed as though crazy ran in the family, it wasn't going to stop Colline from studying her way to escape from invisibility and into the farthest hospital away from home.

Katniss loved her daughter…as much as she possibly could, but it doesn't sound like much.

Nevertheless, Colline was going to study and study and study until everything went away. Perhaps she would end up like her grandmother and mother, but she was going to handle it when she has to cross that bridge.

* * *

Night fell once more on Mellark household, and when it seemed the quietest, Abel slipped outside his window and snuck out to the meadow. He had been creeping around in the middle of the night without his family knowing for several months now, on and off, in hopes of meeting this girl. Simply put, this girl was the reason why Abel had been losing sleep, and sleeping in so late.

Abel jammed his fists into his pockets as he waited and waited for her. She would never come on time, whenever he'd ask her to meet her here in this meadow. But Abel was always so prompt anyway, in case she would decide otherwise and arrive early.

A "Hey" cut through the dark and Abel turned so fast on the balls of his feet that he almost tripped over himself.

"Hey," he returned. "Haven't heard from you in a while. I've missed you."

She hardly emerged from the shadows and into the moonlight, and sighed. She was never very tapped into the same emotions that Abel was. She knew Abel was more than interested in her, but her coldness did everything to try to push him away.

She was Annie's youngest. Peeta and Katniss' friend Annie. Annie, who was known for her daze spells. And having been born from a separate father from her older brother, this girl couldn't have been more detached like her mother. She couldn't figure out why in the world a guy like Abel liked her.

He didn't understand either. Maybe, like his father Peeta, Abel was drawn to broken.

* * *

The mind's a fragile thing. Peeta and Katniss were great examples of that. But the morning that Katniss was wheeled into the hospital and hooked up to wires, it surely tested the idea of fragility. The mind was an unpredictable thing.

Katniss was silent the entire trip back home. The doctor had advised to let her be, to let her regain composure before asking her any questions. At first glance, it seemed as if Katniss had finally put the past behind her, put her sister's ghost to rest. But when they arrived at the front step of their home, Katniss came to a halt.

"What's wrong, Katniss?" Peeta said when Katniss cowered a bit into his arm.

"Do—I really live here?" she asked.

Hopeful that forgetting their front door of eighteen years was just a temporary lapse; Peeta ignored it and guided his wife into their home.

However, Katniss didn't appear to recognize anything. Not the fireplace she had used to love sitting at. Not the plate of cheese buns Peeta would always make for her. Nor the two teenagers coming down the hall and greeting her.

"How are you, Mother?" Colline asked.

"You feeling better?" Abel asked as well.

"I—I don't—" Katniss hid behind Peeta, the only person she seemed to recognize.

"Katniss, these are our kids," Peeta told her, pulling her from behind him. He held her still at her arms and looked into her eyes. "Don't you remember?"

Katniss fingered the ring on her left hand. "…So we are married."

As it had turned out, the treatment did more than wipe Katniss' memory of Prim and her traumatic death. It had purged every memory of ever having a younger sister, but also the memories of having children, of getting married, even as far back as before the 74th Reaping. She remembered nothing. Except the boy with the bread when she younger.

"What a miracle!" Colline exclaimed sarcastically. "Father, she's forgotten everything!"

"No, they have to be there," Peeta said.

"Do memories die?" Abel asked. They tried to show her paintings, ones that Peeta had created about their life after the fall of the Capitol, but forbidding the ones before it. They showed Katniss the children's portraits, and their toasting. But none of it came back to her, and it was unsettling.

But Peeta refused to see the negativity in this. "No, this will be okay. Katniss, you'll be okay. Everything will be better than before." He didn't let another beat pass before he called up the doctor, who told him that they'd need to help her remember, because he had expected some memory loss—just not this much. Peeta needed to be careful, though, with which memories he wanted to give to Katniss.

* * *

Several yet measured weeks passed, and they were spent helping Katniss recover. The children weren't of much help—Colline was impatient and had to study, while Abel slept more than usual—so Peeta took on the load of reminding Katniss of how loved she is.

He had to take her through it all, from the very beginning. How he fell in love with her. From the mathematics class and her two braids, to saving her from starvation. And then he sped through the rest, leaving the details vague. But all that mattered to him was for Katniss to remember how she said her love for him was real.

"You…" Katniss squinted her eyes, trying to recall the images. "You had trouble sleeping. You had nightmares, didn't you?" she asked.

"Yes," Peeta beamed. "Yes, that's right. You remember, Katniss?"

"Just barely," she confessed. "I—I remember bits and pieces. Like, Abel hiding his girlfriend from us."

"Wait." Their son popped his head into the room. "You know about that?"

"I used to hunt," Katniss said, recalling it at that very moment. "I don't see why I would miss something like that. And even though I can't remember giving birth to either of you, I do faintly remember Colline scolding our neighbor's cat…"

"That's because I don't like cats," Colline muttered. "I learned from—"

"Cole—" Peeta warned. He didn't want anything to trace back to old Buttercup. Prim's cat. "What do you think, Katniss? That enough for today? I think we made really good progress."

Katniss nodded. "It's just—is it normal to feel like I should remember something that's far out of reach?"

"Normal?" Colline smirked. "I don't think that term's very familiar around here."

"Don't worry," Peeta promised Katniss. "I'm going to get us back to better than before."

"Anything will be better than before," Abel proposed.

Katniss looked upon the faces of her family. They all seemed hopeful, concerned, exhausted. She murmured, "It must be."

* * *

"You're here," Abel said gladly when he saw the girl of his dreams stroll into the meadow.

"I am," she simply replied. She sat beside him on a fallen log, but with a respectable distance from him. "But, Abel. We should stop this. Meeting here."

"Why?" he asked. "Do you want to meet later in the day?"

"It's not fair to you…"

"I might have to get used to the new sleeping pattern but—"

"Just shut up and listen," she interrupted.

"What is then?" Abel hung his head. "Why do you push me away?"

"You just remind me of…the father I never had," she said. "The person who truly loved my mother, even though she was off. Because I'm bound to end up just like her, Abel. Messed up in the head. She only grew worse when she lost him…"

"Don't give up on me," Abel said. "I can be perfect for you. As Finnick was for your mother. I can…love you like he loved your mother. I…love you."

She shook her head slowly at him. "Goodbye, Abel."

* * *

"Good afternoon, Doctor," Katniss greeted as she walked into the office.

"How are you, Katniss?" he asked. "How are you coming along since the treatment?"

"I—I don't know," she stammered honestly. "I'm remembering things."

"That's wonderful!"

"But, there's so many gaps I want to fill. You tell Peeta to take things slow, but I want to know…everything."

"Are you talking with your husband?" he asked.

"He's the one who stops our sessions before I want to know more."

"Is it helping you remember? Are they helping things come together at all?"

"No! No, that's just it!" Katniss exclaimed, suddenly frantic. She threaded her fingers into her hair. "How am I supposed to know what I should truly know? The map in my head is in pieces, and I can't help feeling like I'm missing some of those pieces. Why? Why is everything so confusing? How did I end up this way?"

"Has Peeta talked to you about your depression?" the doctor asked, attempting to calm his patient down.

"No."

"Your hallucinations?"

"No."

"Your sister?"

* * *

"Katniss, don't," Peeta said when he found her with the Mockingjay pin in her hand. Somehow she had found it hidden under their mattress. "Don't do this to yourself."

"How could I forget?" she said tearfully. Right when the doctor had mentioned a sister, everything thing came flooding back. The Reaping, volunteering as tribute. The war, the parachute bombing. Her sister's hot blood spattered on her skin. "How could I _forget_…that it was all my fault?"

Peeta took long strides to reach her, and picked up the pieces that she was broken in. "You didn't do anything but try to save her," he spoke into the mess of her hair, over the sobs that she couldn't control. "There was nothing you could've done more."

"What was her name?" she said through the tremors. "Peeta, what was her name?"

"Katniss," he pleaded.

"Tell me. Please, for my own sake, tell me!"

"You'll be okay," Peeta tried. He hurried to the phone and dialed. "We're going to be fine. I'll just call the doctor and—"

"Peeta!" she shrieked at him, hurling the pin across the room, just missing her husband. "My sister! Her name!" Katniss grabbed her head and repeated over and over "Name," bringing herself to her knees once more.

Peeta was torn. Comfort and calm his wife, or call the doctor to save her. Because he was beginning to feel as helpless as he was, watching her reduce to tears over a person he knew she loved more than he. He felt his head splitting from the decision while the dial tone buzzed, between the wailing and the screaming.

"_Tell me her name!"_

It wasn't until Abel crashed in and yelled, "Father!" to wake him up from throwing back the Mockingjay pin. Peeta slumped onto the bed and dragged a hand through his hair, letting the pin clatter on the floor.

Colline arrived a moment later, and upon seeing her family so dysfunctional, like her own mother and her mother before her, she shut down. A switch went off her head and some things went blurry and black, some things became so much clearer. All that ran through her mind were currently numbing agents for pain.

The doctor made a visit to the Mellark home, since Katniss refused to make the trip to his office where more ECT treatment would be waiting for her. Peeta could hardly take hearing his wife's stubborn answer to refuse more treatment for her relapse—which was common in his patients, the doctor assured. Even when Katniss was warned about her condition, and how her depression was chronic, and, putting it bluntly for her safety, that patients like her were imminently suicidal; she denied further treatment.

The doctor left, dejected. And soon after, Katniss wanted to follow the footsteps out the door.

Abel observed his parents, who were once so in love with each other. But having been rejected by his own love of his life, instead of trying to put them back together, Abel rushed to his father's side, saying, "Why do you keep trying, Father? It's pointless." A son who saw how much pain his father was in, disintegrating right before his brown eyes, and for once, connected with his father through the heartache. "Let her go," Abel choked out, because he had done it with that girl from the meadow.

"Enough," Peeta told his son, his voice exhausted. "I made your mother a promise."

"Why should I stay?" Katniss asked blankly. "Why don't you get on with living, because everyone knows you tried. Tell me why you want to stay."

"Yeah, Father," Abel spoke up. "I can't sit here and just watch you tolerate with all the hurt and coping you do for her. Exactly why would you stay? Just end it. You'd be better off that way."

Peeta snapped his eyes up to Katniss, and stood despite his weak legs. "Because you once asked me to stay," he said to her. "And I told you—promised you—I would, _always_." He gathered her limp hands and held them tenderly. "The girl on fire—you burned so brightly for me, to get me through my nightmares. When I was lost and troubled with ghosts of my own. Katniss, you may have forgotten that girl on fire, but I'm going to keep looking for her and her light, every night. To tell her I love her. And I may have forgotten who I am for a moment, but I remember me and you. And what we had, was real. I made you a promise, Katniss, so that's why I stay. Don't forget."

The tears sprung up to Katniss' eyes again so she shut them to keep most tears from falling. She threw her arms around Peeta and held on for dear life.

"Don't forget," a voice echoed.

Katniss opened her reddened eyes and saw her again. Her sister. Prim.

She was alive.

* * *

Katniss threw on her coat and sped through the field to the doctor's house. She rapped on his door until he woke up and let her in.

Fearfully, she confessed, "I see her again. I remember her."

"As upsetting as it is," the doctor yawned, "the only solution I see is more—"

"No!" Katniss slammed her hand on the armrest of the chair she was sitting on. "No more! I just want to know why. Why am I seeing her again? You said the treatment would work!"

"Perhaps your delusions are so buried underneath your conscious. Perhaps if—"

"If the ECT didn't work then, Doctor, it won't work now…" Katniss splayed a hand over her chest, where her heart laid pounding. It was slow but strong enough to pulse in her head, in her throat, and in the pit of her stomach. The tremors that rippled through her were bone deep. Her past medications had calmed these symptoms before, but never really cured her, she realized. And when something as drastic as electrocuting her brain wasn't successful, Katniss had to think.

There was never a break in her head that made her see her dead sister. The burns from the parachute bombing had long scabbed over and healed into warped flesh, but still the flaming sensations couldn't be any more white hot and blinding. Her irregular heartbeat wasn't due to a phantom's hand squeezing at her chest.

Her delusions went far deeper than those things. Prim couldn't leave Katniss, no matter how much she tried to sever ties from her little sister.

This wasn't anything psychological. Prim was a part of her. Prim was in her soul. And it was killing her.

"Mother?" Colline said when she saw her step outside of the doctor's house. Katniss lifted her gaze, and her daughter bowed her head, her fidgety hands restless. "I—I heard everything. You won't go through with it."

"No." Katniss pressed a kiss to her daughter's forehead, and when she pulled away, she saw Colline so much older than she had remembered. As they walked home together, Katniss realized her daughter was growing up, and she wasn't here to see it.

Katniss had become her own mother, detached from her daughter to cope with her problems on her own, and it angered her. Here she was, a mother who had never wanted children and a husband in the first place, because she was afraid this very situation would happen. She also felt shame, a similar shame that Colline was feeling.

Colline mirrored her mother so much. A girl with a fiery anger yet so full with hope, a girl who was shortchanged with a mother just couldn't cope.

"I'm sorry, Colline," Katniss spoke up. "I couldn't give you the normal life I wished for you."

"Normal?" Colline smirked wryly. "My mother and my father historically won the Hunger Games together. You started a rebellion that saved this world. Father was a hijacked Capitol prisoner. How could you even imagine a normal life after all of that?"

"I'm sorry," Katniss repeated again after the arsenal of memories flashed in her eyes.

"No," Colline stopped her mother in her tracks. "Do you know how many years of my life I've spent wishing for the normal life? And I knew the only way that would happen is if you went away. But, to tell you the truth, I was afraid you would actually leave me. And the days I thought you were going to die from insanity, I cried. I cried because—"

"Because I couldn't be the mother you wanted."

"And I can't be the daughter who could possibly measure up to your sister," Colline added sadly. She shook her head. "But one thing I learned from you, is not to cry. You didn't cry over Grandma when she shut you out."

Helplessly, Katniss promised, "It will get better." An empty promise.

Colline's seam eyes grew distant. "Not for me," she said. "The thing is, I don't need a normal life, Mother. It's a long shot for us. But…something next to normal would be all right. Just something to…get us by."

* * *

Abel was out in the sunlight for once, staring out at the District from the meadow, and picking at the weeds.

"Hey."

At the sound of her voice, Abel resisted whipping around, too excited, and instead turned his head over his shoulder. "Hey," he said back. He tended back to the patch of weeds at his feet.

"How's your mother?" she asked timidly. And if Abel listened closely enough, there laced was guilt. "Is she okay?"

"Maybe someday," he said, his voice flat and void of emotion. "What are you doing here? I thought we were through."

She carefully sat down next to Abel, keeping the same distance they were used to. "Not today," she murmured. "Why are you here, Abel? The view isn't even that great. It's depressing, really, with the—"

"I come here for you," he confessed offhandedly.

The wind whistled through the meadow. She took it into consideration with the silence she left hanging in the air. "Say…we see this thing through," she began. "You said you'd be perfect for me, but how about when I'm crazy? I might end up crazy like my mother, talking nonsense, having screaming outbursts, tantrums in the middle of the Square, walking naked in the snow, bleeding—"

"Hey," Abel interrupted, catching her frail wrist before she could start pulling out her hair. "I will be perfect for you. Because I know crazy. My family is full of it; I might be crazy, too. So I know I can do crazy."

She chuckled bitterly and rolled her eyes. "Perfect."

"Perfect for you," he corrected.

* * *

After a long talk with her daughter, Katniss had decided to sit down with Abel as well, and covered the same apologies she had gone over with Colline. She went over her "I love you's" and "I'm sorry's," which Abel meekly accepted after all the ache she had caused his father. But now that things had rekindled with the girl from the meadow, he humbled his mother. Katniss told him to cherish the girl—whom she knew to be Annie's daughter—and to stay true and real to her as his father was to her.

Love was an extreme and bizarre ideal, so he could understand.

Peeta was in the next room, the kitchen, the entire time, looming over the stove and blocking out the words his wife was saying. It all sounded too serious, as if she was saying her goodbyes, without ever really saying them.

Once their son had left home, to probably spend more time in the meadow, and with Colline studying out in the woods, Katniss joined Peeta in the kitchen. He didn't look at her. He couldn't. Not with the expression of regret, of disappointment, of sheer anger bearing down and twisted on his face.

"Peeta," she whispered into his shoulder, and the muscles there tensed. It was the closest they had come to physical contact in such a long time. But they eased into it.

Peeta turned around ever so slowly, careful to not scare her away, and gathered her body in his arms. The words they wanted to say to each other rather translated into their movements. Peeta wanted to say how much he missed her by embracing her and rubbing his hands along the small of her back. And Katniss wanted to apologize for all the trouble she had caused by caressing his cheek and kissing the other.

But he caught the kiss with his lips and leaned into it, trying to reignite the passion they once had between them.

"I have to go," she quickly slipped in when Peeta had to take a breath.

He pulled back and searched her eyes for any sign of uncertainty. "No," he simply said, and held her tighter.

"You need to let me go." She took a step back, but Peeta quickly grabbed her by the wrist.

"I won't let you," he strained to say, unable to take in how his hand was like a vice grip.

"Clearly I can't stay, Peeta," she whispered harshly as she snatched back her wrist. "We'd both go mad if I do."

"How am I supposed to keep my promise, Katniss," he said, "when you're the one who doesn't want to stay?" The tears filled his eyes to the brim, hot and stinging and blinding. They were tears that Katniss could never conjure.

"You fulfilled your promise, Peeta," she reassured him. "For years, you stayed true to me, and I tried to stay true to you. I tried to love you the way you love me, but…I can't stand to keep you on this off-balance, wondering if I really do love you as much as you think I do."

"It's real," he choked out.

"It's hurting you," she insisted. "Killing you. And if I stay here, I might die of it—seeing you like this. And, Peeta, the last thing I want you to see is me dying. I know what it's like to watch someone you love so dearly dies right before your eyes."

"What am I supposed to do?" he asked weakly, knowing very well Katniss had made her choice without him.

"You'll find a way to be better off without me," she said. "You said to try and remember my life before this. The girl on fire, and who used to be the Mockingjay. I'm going to try and remember how to fly, Peeta, like how you remember me."

He stared at her, and the reasons he had for her not to leave could not form on his tongue. All he could say was, "I love you, Katniss. I always will." He knew better than to keep a bird caged.

Katniss took a step forward and reached into her pocket, pulling out the Mockingjay pin and placing it his palm. She closed his fingers over it, lingering there for just a moment.

"Is it real?" he asked coldly.

Whether he meant if she was truly leaving, or if their years together were a lie, the answer was the same.

"Real," she answered. "Goodbye, Peeta."

* * *

The following night was a struggle for Peeta. The bed he had shared with his wife was cold, and no amount of sheets could cure the icy feeling, so he spent the night sitting on the hardwood floor and glaring out the window.

As he wrung the wedding band around his finger, he felt the blood in him boil. Sometimes he had to stop and clench and unclench is fists to get the hot blood course through his fingers. The immense rage had transcended his sadness, and he tried his best to keep it together.

The last time he had felt this anger…

But Peeta shook it off. He shook off the shadows that tempted him, the shiny things that tested him.

All he wanted was Katniss. To be with her again, to hold her and kiss her again, and keep her safe. He wanted nothing but to see her.

"Peeta."

In the still of the night, Peeta shot up to his feet. "Katniss?" he breathed into the dark.

"It was all your fault, how I ended up."

"I know." He padded toward the voice, eager for warmth. "I know, and I'm so sorry, Katniss. But we'll—"

"How do you think our kids will end up? Crazy like us?"

Peeta stopped in the middle of the floor and narrowed his eyes at the shadowy figure. There was some glow to its silhouette, and in the moonlight flooding in from the window, she shined even brighter.

"No," he said in utter disbelief. "Why don't you just leave me _alone_?"

"I'm always going to be here, Peeta. I've always been here."

"Why didn't you go, too?"

"And leave you all alone? After everything we've been through, you expect me to vanish?" Her voice echoed off the bedroom walls, sending electrifying chills up and down Peeta's spine. Next thing he knew, she was at his ear, louder than ever. "But you've always known I'd come back. You know who I am."

"You." Peeta grit his teeth together, and swung an arm at a ghost. She wasn't glowing. She was shiny and deceiving all over again. "Where are you? _Where are you, you damn_ _mutt_?"

A voice so close to Katniss' darkly laughed. "Right where you want me, Peeta."

* * *

Based heavily on the Broadway Musical _Next To Normal_.


End file.
